The case is about the company Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUN), which is located in Santa Clara (USA) and provided companies with hardware, software, storage and services in information technology (IT). SUN was founded in 1982 at the Stanford University and derived its name from the Stanford University Network. One of the company´s competitive strategies had been the global presence all over the world in order to provide excellent support to its clients anytime. Furthermore SUN could take big advantages over its competitors due to the ownership of technologies like “Solaris”, “UltraSPARC” and the “JAVA” platform. As a result, SUN had earned impressive revenues of $14 billion and holds 35,000 employees in 47 different countries.
Greg James is the global manager of Sun Microsystems Inc. and leads a global team of 45 people. He studied computer science engineering at the Stanford University and had been praised for his talent of solving complex technical problems. Various Silicon Valley companies tried to hire Greg, however, he chose SUN after extensive research, as he wanted to work for a technology company where he could grow and develop his professional career. After working five years for SUN he received the SUN outstanding Manager award and was praised for his excellent customer service.
Greg’s global team is composed of 45 members in France, India, the United Arabic Emirates and the United States and serve customers in Asia and Europe. His team faced a big challenge with an UK company, the HS Holding, which has a $300,000 premium contract with Sun Microsystems. The problem was that HS Holding’s entire server system went down for two hours, which caused a big disaster for their whole online banking business. HS Holding’s support team tried to contact SUN for help but nobody responded to their inquiry. Therefore, SUN threatening a lawsuit, because they violated the service contract. What is more, HS Holding requested a refund of their loss and a return of the $300,000 premium contract fee. Due to this fatal incident, Greg realized that he has to act immediately to improve the situation and identify the existing issues among his global team.